Summer Guide to Ice Cream

Summer is here now, and that means guiltless ice cream dates and popsicles galore! I thought I’d list a few of my favorites around the city of Atlanta.

The Frosty Caboose

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This place redefines the portion. It’s absolutely ridiculous how much ice cream you get for your money, and the flavors are really varied. This ice cream gets my pick if you’re looking for really creamy, rich deliciousness.

King of Pops

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These guys have been a stable at festivals and events since they launched, but you can pick up some tasty treats any day of the week at one of their mobile locations (see their website for a cart locator) or in some of their retail resellers.

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Morelli’s

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This place takes the cake for the best flavor variety. Only here can you expect to pick up crazy flavors like coconut-jalapeño and black pepper and strawberry. It’s a bit more expensive than your average ice cream parlour, so I like to come here for summer evening dinner dates, perhaps after a meal in Decatur or a movie at the Starlight Drive-In.

These are just some favorites of mine, but I love discovering new spots, so if you have some favorite ice cream joints around town, let me know in the comments.

One of the wonderful things about owning a Mac is the developer community that has arisen around the platform. For years, Apple computers and now iOS devices have distinguished themselves with rich, colorfully designed applications made with care and love. Designers have been a Mac-heavy crowd for decades now, and the wealth of beautiful design has been the result.

When I browse my Applications directory, I am sometimes struck by how beautiful all the icons are and on a Retina Display, these vibrant, playful icons are even more gorgeous. I thought I’d share with you all what my Applications directory looks like.

Some of the names are impossible to read because of how I had to resize the icons, so I’ve also included the full list of names.

New Places

As some of you know by now, I’ve joined the team at TourBuzz and left my  position at BFA Technologies, where I’ve been for the last two years. The move was nothing short of bittersweet, as I’ve greatly enjoyed being a member of the Apple Consultants Network and all the great work we did together at BFA.

Apple has been a big part of my life since my first MacBook in 2006, through my year in Apple Retail, and for the last two years as a consultant. I’ve learned so much and it’s shaped my direction for my life pushing my further into technology and teaching me about people’s needs and pain points, ranging from consumer to enterprise. BFA was a great place for me, and I was able to learn alongside some remarkably knowledgable and talented people and interact with fantastic clients every day. They are hands-down the best people for any Apple-related IT questions in the entire Southeast United States. I would trust them implicitly with any work I needed done. I can’t wait to see them continue to grow without me, and I think they’re about to have a couple really explosive years in a row based on where things are right now.

So why did I leave? It all boils down to the fact that I want to be working on product instead of services. I had learned most of the things about technology consulting that interested me, and was ready to move on to creating something repeatable in software rather than solving existing problems. I’ve always been good at dealing with clients and helping people understand technology, but the challenges associated with building a product are more exciting to me, so I’ve found a happy medium at TourBuzz where I’ll be leading all customer support while I get to help a product develop over time. We make a platform for real estate photographers to host interactive virtual tours, and while I won’t be working on the core product itself, I will be the voice of the company to our users and will be able to have direct input into future development. That’s a combination of responsibility and blue-sky creativity I’ve been searching for.

I’m one week in and very happy. Our office is on Seminole Ave, just south of Ponce. I’ll be moving into my new apartment just around the corner at the beginning of May, so lots of things are changing, but all for the better.

I’m very happy.

To This Day.

Mourning Aaron Swartz.

The passing of Aaron Swartz is a tragedy of monumental proportions. When the news first came in of his death, I hadn’t even heard his name, but in researching him, I was swiftly and deeply saddened. His legacy is a great one, even at the young age of 26. As someone who is fanatically concerned with the freedom of information and open access to human knowledge, I grieve the loss of one of our champions. For more information about Aaron and his accomplishment, I highly recommend Cory Doctorow’s comments on the matter.

MIT has ordered an internal investigation into the Institute’s role in Aaron’s prosecution and harassment by the US Department of Justice. The DOJ has formally dropped all pending charges against Aaron Swartz.

[UPDATE]: Westboro Baptist Church [sic] has disgustingly announced its plans to picket and protest Aaron’s funeral. Anonymous has responded, and plans to defend the funeral against the WBC protesters as part of #OpAngel.

[UPDATE 2]: WBC has dropped plans to protest Aaron’s funeral after learning of Anon’s plans to stop them.

A Future Without Physical Media

In recent releases of Mac hardware, Apple has been gradually dropping support for optical media drives (CD/DVD drives), and with the rise of the tablet computer as a replacement for traditional [sic] PCs, we’re all learning how to live without our precious stack of floppies. These days, everything can be streamed, synced, and even charged without wires and the expansion of wireless and cellular networks has brought us instant access to music and video on demand to all our devices.

Just as computers and the internet have dramatically reduced our reliance on paper records, the new storefronts that have arisen online are gradually killing off physical media as a method of data transfer (we still need storage, and increasingly, more of it). Optical media and even USB thumb drives are being discarded in favor of download codes (ironically, often printed on paper).

Where does this leave us, then? What will we have to show our children and future generations? Who will step forward to archive and curate the massive amounts of data we each generate? Will people travel from around the world visit The External Hard Drive of Alexandria? Unlikely.

Records matter, and ours are getting harder to keep track of and manage as file formats slip into obscurity, hard drives corrupt, and we rely on networks to be active to even view our own data. Wars will come, and data centers will be destroyed. Data will be lost for all time, as has happened throughout history, but never before in such quantities. Years of personal and public history can be erased if the correct set of buildings are destroyed, or if other, newer forms of weaponry are used. The bomb of the future may simply be a computer virus that silently sneaks across data networks, awaiting zero hour and shutting down infrastructure.

We’ve already begun to see examples of this, like Stuxnet, and we will see more soon. This isn’t the cry of the luddite, or a warning, it’s just an observation on our inevitable future. As a comedian, my joke and sketch ideas are distributed across iOS Notes, Evernote, Moleskine notebooks, scraps of paper, and a few audio recordings. I keep trying to pull it all together, but no system works perfectly for me and none of them are immune to failure and loss. The irony is not lost on me that I’m writing this brief essay online and am trusting someone else’s servers to keep it safe for me. It’s an adage as old as language itself, but next time, if you want to remember something, and especially if you want anyone else to remember it, maybe just write it down.

(originally posted at sam.position.cc)

My Thoughts on Apple’s New Maps

They’re good. They’ll get better.

Everyone is throwing a wobbly about Apple latest release of Maps, which replaces Google’s tiles with a combination of technologies from OpenStreet, TomTom, and Apple’s own technologies which they acquired from C3 Technologies (along with a couple other acquisitions in the space last year).

This is a brand new product, and it’s experiencing some growing pains, and has some glaring inaccuracies for some people. One of the biggest features it lacks is adequate public transportation information, and the public outcry has been for Google to release its Maps as a stand-alone app through The App Store. Rumor has it, that this is actually happening, and is awaiting Apple’s approval, but as with any rumor, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I think this would be a great move for Google as it would highlight something the company has been doing very well for a long time, and show them in a positive light as reliable, trustworthy, and established, while it would make Apple look like an unreliable newcomer (the exact opposite of the overall tone of the smartphone wars). I also think Apple should approve this app, and let a fair competition happen. If Apple bans this app from the store, it will just make them look scared and controlling, and that’s not a good look, especially after the pubic opinion has shifted negatively after all the Samsung lawsuits.

I personally have had great success using Apple’s new Maps, and I’ve been loving the traffic, construction, and accident data that is layered in. I will continue to use the native Maps, even if Google releases a stand-alone solution, because I think massive user adoption and data collection is the only way we can expect the system to get better, and I think by using vector-based maps, user-generated traffic flow data, and by controlling the Maps project in-house, Apple will be able to fundamentally improve the way we get around the world. They’ve made a significant investment in this new system, and I’m willing to make a minor one to see how it progresses.

UPDATE: Apple CEO Tim Cook has released a public statement addressing users’ frustration.

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